


and flew like a moth to you, sunlight, oh, sunlight

by cactuslesbian



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist Sasha James, Character Death, Desolation Avatar Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Dreamscapes, F/M, Kinda?, Mutual Pining, Roleswap, Soul Bond, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:35:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24676213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cactuslesbian/pseuds/cactuslesbian
Summary: "They think you've ruined me."“Have I?” Sasha asks.Tim’s eyes are tired, so dark they seem black. Sasha could swear they almost glow like coals in the otherwise dark and quiet room they find themselves in. They are deep and intense and seem to be looking through her.“Probably. But I couldn’t begin to thank you enough.”or, the desolation messiah tim and archivist sasha roleswap au that no one asked for but its happening.
Relationships: Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson, Sasha James & Tim Stoker, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 13
Kudos: 83





	and flew like a moth to you, sunlight, oh, sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> okay so at some point my discord server started talking about a timsasha gertrudeagnes roleswap au and hhhhhh i had to do the dew.
> 
> tbh the timeline is a Mess and jumps around a ton but. I pretend i do not see it.

Timothy Stoker is not a happy child and neither is Sasha James.

The adults that hover around Tim as he grows from a toddler to a little boy are reverent and careful. They talk about his destiny and how one day he will usher in the scorched earth; raze the world and satisfy their god. But they’ve never held him. They don’t let him engage in childish behaviors because they do not consider him a child. He’s a weapon, a tool, and one day he’ll fulfill his purpose. Why waste time pretending?

  
  
  


Sasha doesn’t know consistency. She’s held post-it notes in her little hands and read the looping script before she was old enough to understand what they’d meant. She doesn’t see her mother much, always working or drinking with friends. Doesn’t know her outside of the post-its and the empty bottles on the counters and the table. _Have a good day. Be good. Don’t go in my room._ Sasha can make her own lunches and microwaves her dinners but that's only when there is food to be made. She wears her house key on a chain around her neck and she doesn’t really read the notes anymore.

* * *

Tim is sent to live with the Fairchild’s a few months after he turns ten. Simon is seldom around, but the cliffside house is a revolving door of those tied to the Falling Titan. He thinks it’s a punishment at first, living with servants of a different god. Harriet explains to him one night that his family simply wanted him to be around more people before his destiny came to pass, that they'd like him to understand the world before he destroys it.

The seaside town feels like years and years away from the cliffside house, but from time to time the Fairchild’s will take him down there to mingle with the average person, even other children sometimes. Simon brings him brushes and paint. Despite this, the Fairchild’s never make the mistake of thinking of him as a regular child. But despite all that, Tim is happy there.

  
  
  


When Sasha is ten she is removed from her mother’s care. The first few weeks leave uncertainty hanging over her head like a low lying cloud and she cries herself to sleep in an unfamiliar bed. It’s about two months before she’s placed with an older couple. They’re gentle and kind and make waffles for breakfast on the weekends and Sasha feels out of place in the James’ house at first. 

They respect her space, though. They don’t push her to talk to them but they make it clear that she can. Her report cards are pinned to the fridge and dinner is warm and eaten at the table over inside jokes and easy small talk. One of her fathers cries the first time she calls him dad, kisses her head. She feels happy for maybe the first time.

* * *

When Sasha is twenty-four she applies to the Magnus Institute in London. A man in a crisp gray suit shakes her hand and welcomes her. He smiles, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. 

Her three months in artifact storage are tedious and frightful. She’d read about hauntings and demons and whatnot, but the things the institute keeps feel... Malevolent, almost. Tangibly so. Sasha laughs it off with her fathers, doesn’t want to worry them, but it's around that time she starts to really _believe_ in evil. 

  
  
  


Tim has grown into his role and even accepts it most days. The tantrums that result in burning even members of the cult have long since stopped. He talks fondly of fire and burning and the reckoning that will leave the earth a blackened husk. The zealots around him don’t even consider that he might be lying. Or if they do, they say nothing.

He’s radiant with little effort; walks with a grace and composure that speaks to his so-called divinity. Even people who don’t know what he is are as enthralled as they are afraid of him. Men, women, people who are both and neither attempt to get close from time to time. Some discover devotion under his intense gaze, join the cult, some are purified in his holy fire. But they do not know him and they will never understand him.

* * *

Sasha has been the head archivist for about two years when she decides she must do something about the man mentioned in the statements about burning, the man who people swear will bring about the end of the world. Names are seldom mentioned but someone swears his name was Tim. Sasha would laugh if the situation weren’t dire; what kind of fire monster has a name like “ _Tim_ ”. 

Several months pass with Sasha doing research into the early hours, occasionally driving for hours and hours to chase a lead that turns out to yet again be a dead end. But the answer, much to her annoyance, doesn't come from the tireless bordering on obsessive research that’s consumed her life. 

A man by the name of Blackwood gives his statement about spiders and webs and how he can see strings connecting people and when he pulls the strings, the people attached to them move and do the things he wants. Sasha is as fascinated as she is horrified.

She seeks him out later, talks to him at a cafe about her predicament and a possible solution. Martin smiles gently, the gesture suiting his round and freckled face, even if it makes the hair on Sasha’s arms stand up. 

“How do I know you aren’t ‘puppeting’ me. That I’m choosing to do this on my own?”

Martin sets his hand in her’s, that easy smile never so much as wavering. Sasha can’t help but notice that his hands are calloused and rough. Cold to the touch, like a corpse. 

“I want to be friends,” Martin assures. “It isn’t _polite_ to pull on your friend’s strings. But if I were, do you think I would stop to chat about it?”

Sasha bristles a bit in her seat. “Okay, but why? What do you get out of this?”

Martin shrugs and idly stirs his cup of hot chocolate. “Call it a favor. I do this for you and later you can do something for me.”

Her hand curls into a fist around the fabric of her skirt under the table as she suddenly remembers old stories her father would tell while slightly drunk; stories of crossroad demons and deals. Deals that usually end in tragedy for those who had made them. 

Sasha wonders if the people in the stories had been as desperate as she is to stop the coming of the Desolation's ritual, the end of the world.

“Let me sleep on it.” she asks him.

That smile continues to be gentle and pleasant, “Of course. I’m in no rush.”

That night after Sasha washes a spiderweb out of her hair in the shower she can’t remember if her kitchen had so many cobwebs before her talk with Martin or if they’re new. She doesn’t take her broom to them like she always would even if she so desperately wants to. 

* * *

Martin asks her if she’s ready and she knows she isn’t. But the choice is her own, she’s sure of that. She thinks that if it hadn’t been, she wouldn’t be so afraid. 

Sasha asks him if it will hurt when they’re bound together. Martin assures her that it will. She’s not as afraid of the pain as she is with owing Martin and the Mother he speaks of a favor.

In the end, her desperation wins and she agrees.

* * *

Tim is acutely aware of the change when it occurs. He doesn’t know how or why, but he can feel her lungs burn and constrict as the inferno that composes him seeps into her lungs. He doubles over and coughs up ash as smoke curls from his mouth, open as though in a silent scream. 

His skin blisters for the first time, his hands reddening and cracking as he curls and shakes and tries so hard to remember to breathe. 

Is this what it feels like to _burn_?

Tim drags himself to the phone; he should call Diego, Arthur. Tell them what’s happening, how he feels as though he’s going to die. That he’s burning and not in the usual way. 

But before he can, the burning stops.

Tim lies on the floor as his breathing begins to regulate itself. He still feels echoes of the pain; his lungs have never contracted like that before, never burned like that before. His hand rests on his chest and for the very first time, he feels a thrumming steady heartbeat echo under his palm. It’s alien there, not something that belongs entirely to him.

When he stands and reaches for the phone, he glances at the mirror. Beside his reflection is a young woman and he checks beside him for just a moment to see if someone has gotten in; he knows that several members of their congregation have a key to his flat, though he doesn’t recognize her. The space just behind him is empty and the girl in the mirror doesn’t react.

She’s bent over what looks like a tree stump, one hand balled into a tight fist around the fabric of her shirt as though she’s having a heart attack, but somehow Tim knows that her lungs are _burning_. Her dark hair is floating around her head and her face is stained with tear tracks. There are burns on her hands that mirror his own and ash on her mouth.

As she looks up with big brown eyes, his breath hitches. Somehow, he knows. He can’t tell if it's the shape of someone's legs he sees behind her or the steady heartbeat that doesn’t belong to him thrumming in his chest. Somehow, he knows that she feels it, whatever this is, as well. That, and she sees him too

* * *

Sasha sees him in her dreams from time to time. Sitting in a coffee shop and idly sketching. Sitting among handfuls of cultists, looking vaguely bored and clearly detached. He wears crisp shirts and inhales smoke from candles that seem to scream in an otherwise silent room. She feels the apathy and the resignation of someone who’s never known any better. Feels second hand guilt he's tried so hard to smother, telling himself that it's his _right_ to feed. But the ache in his chest doesn't go away.

Sasha thinks of reaching out to him, condemning him, or offering some kind of comfort, but what could she possibly say? She had never expected him to feel anything, let alone such human things as guilt or resignation. So she sits in silence and watches for what seems like months.

"I see you." He tells her one night.

Sasha freezes even in the dream, face like a child who’s been caught with one hand in the cookie jar. Tim simply shrugs.

"The others are furious, you know." He tells her conversationally. She watches him idly lift a paintbrush and add a few strokes of bright searing orange to a canvas. The building he’s painted is on fire and he's somehow managed to capture the way the foundation falls apart as it burns. "They think you've ruined me."

“Have I?” Sasha asks. 

Tim’s eyes are tired, so dark they seem black. Sasha could swear they almost glow like coals in the otherwise dark and quiet room they find themselves in. They are deep and intense and seem to be looking through her.

“Probably. But I couldn’t begin to thank you enough.”

Sasha’s brows furrow as she continues to watch him paint. Somehow she’s never considered that he might have hobbies, mundane little routines. She’d always been envisioning a monster in a vaguely human shell, not a gentle-looking man who carefully paints in the quiet of his flat.

She notices that there are hung paintings around the flat; lots of burning buildings, red skies, blackened pillars of smoke carefully brought about in careful brush strokes, but there are flowers too.

* * *

Sasha can feel him as he burns and despite their best efforts, the Lightless Flame cannot undo the threads that bind them to each other. Sometimes she discusses him like a friend she doesn’t see much these days, he’s taken to calling her his anchor. More than once she has seen a person she recognizes as a cultist hovering nearby and Sasha cannot tell if their intentions are to protect or to hurt her.

Their first meeting in-person is in a quiet little cafe across from an art store. Tim sits at the booth with a sketchbook and idly draws the barista as Sasha slides in across from him. She’s unsure how long he’s been sitting there with an untouched pastry that steams lightly in the cool morning air, but he seems like a fixture at this place, as though he’s as much a part of it as the lights and the tables.

“May I?” he asks softly and gestures to his notebook. She notices the page he's working on is full of faces and figures of strangers, dozens of them in all ages. 

Still, Sasha only just manages to conceal her surprise at the request. No one has ever drawn her before. “If you’d like.”

As they talk he idly sketches her and she can’t help but notice his movements are practiced, not in the way an artist knows their craft, but as someone who knows her. She watches his pencil make the delicate curve of her mouth, the nearly ever-present crease between her eyebrows, her curls almost lovingly defined and haloing around her face. 

A year later, Sasha won’t be able to remember much of that first encounter save for how his hands moved across the sketchbook and how she had a page to herself.

* * *

“Nasty habit, that.” Tim admonishes softly, though his tone has no bite in it.

Sasha crushes her cigarette underfoot. She’s aware by now that Tim, for as much as fire is a part of him, can’t stand the smell. Maybe that's why it’s not often that she smokes these days, just when she’s particularly stressed. Even so, one of her assistants, a sharp man by the name of Jonathan has caught her at least once fumbling for a lighter in the dark back alley behind the archives. She’d been sure he was going to criticize, but instead simply asked if she had an extra on hand.

“Fancy meeting you here.” She hums in return.

They don’t even have to plan these meetings, really. They simply know where the other is going to be and they talk or simply sit in not-quite-comfortable silence. And today finds them at a park bench beside the river, isolated enough that they’ll have their privacy and close enough to everything that they can be comfortable.

Tim settles into the spot on the bench beside her and she can feel the heat that radiates off of him, like standing next to a furnace. It’s oddly comforting when otherwise surrounded by the cold of the autumn air. Sasha is unsure of why exactly she decides to do what she does next, just knows that she will.

She leans against him.

Tim tenses right away and Sasha immediately sits straight again, mumbling an apology.

“No it’s just-” Tim pauses and chews on his lip as he thinks of the words for what he’s trying to say, “People- they, they don’t touch me. They _can’t_.”

“I think it’s probably fine since it’s over your clothes.” Sasha theorizes, shifting to better face him. She holds her hand just over his arm, the sleeve of his gray overcoat, “May I?” and when he nods she sets her hand on top of his wrist. The heat radiates through, warm and heavy and she looks up at him, “See?”

“it’s because you’re my anchor.” He theorizes softly to her. Tim still sits rigid and still, as though the slightest change will cause Sasha to burn and it’s one of the first times in his life he’s thought twice about letting someone get hurt by him, it’s not the first time he’s regretted what he is. 

And then Sasha sets her hand against his cheek. She’ll tell herself it’s just an experiment, to see if he can burn her. If it will hurt him when he does. Tim sucks in a breath, eyes wide. But there’s no telltale scent of cooking human flesh, even as Sasha moves her thumb slowly over his cheekbone.

She’s about to pull her hand away when Tim covers it in his, eyes shut tightly. She could swear he looks almost afraid. “Please.” He says softly. “Just a little longer.”

The whole basis of their relationship is her denying him of his destiny, she thinks to herself, how can she deny him something as simple as this?

As she keeps moving her thumb gently over his cheekbone, the nearly too-smooth skin of his face, Tim leans his head into her touch, never once opening his eyes as his hand rests on top of her’s. Sasha says nothing about how his face is too hot, like holding boiling coffee in a flimsy paper cup, she just holds his face in her hand as the night passes around them.

* * *

Neither one of them is entirely sure when they grow comfortable with having the other in their respective flats or when the line that separates enemies blurs into acquaintances and then into what could almost be called friends. 

Tim idly traces his fingertip around a picture of Sasha with her fathers, her little face wide and grinning brightly behind the glass in the shadows of what looks to be a ferris wheel, some kind of carnival. She looks so carefree and he wishes he’d felt like that even once in his life.

“Do you think that we have a destiny?” He asks 

Sasha is only mildly taken aback. She’s only really surprised he said nothing about this sort of thing before. She stirs her cup of tea and stands beside him to look at the picture. “I’ve never been big on that sort of thing,” she tells him. 

Though who can say what will happen if she dies first. 

(If you’d asked the younger and desperate Sasha James, she’d tell you. She’d tell you that as soon as she died Timothy Stoker would raze the world and usher in the Scorched Earth. Please his god. That somehow she’d stop him, even if she had to die to do it.)

(The Archivist isn’t sure he even wants that anymore or if he ever really did. She can feel the doubt hanging over his head like a low cloud, only kept at bay by a strict and unforgiving sense of duty to the only family he’d ever known. A lack of choice as real as a hand around his throat.)

Tim hums softly and offers Sasha a small smile, “You look happy here.” He says, hand still hovering over the glass of her picture frame. The way things are, he’s never seen her that happy. Not like she is in the picture.

“That was about a year after they adopted me,” Sasha finds herself saying. “School had just let out and they wanted to take me to do something fun. We went on the ferris wheel over and over, rode the roller coaster, ate so much junk food. By the time it was over dad had to carry me to the car and I kept falling asleep on his shoulder. I think it was the most fun I’ve ever had.” a pause, “did you ever have a day like that? Where everything was just perfect?”

Tim considers for a moment before answering, “Simon taught me how to paint. Got me my first set of brushes and acrylics. We spent the afternoon painting the clouds.”

They end up trading little stories for hours. Sasha telling him about her first kiss in high school, Tim talking about how Harriet will still visit sometimes. It’s the most open they’ve ever been with each other.

* * *

They know that it’s a bad idea. They can both feel the apprehension the other feels as though they’re an echo chamber. Not because they don’t want this, but because of everything else. Because they want it a little too much. She works at the buttons of his shirt with one hand and he kisses her hard, his hand in her hair. 

He asks consistently through if she’s alright, if he’s burning more than usual, if he’s hurting her. Sasha’s brow is beaded with sweat and her fingernails dig into the soft wax-like skin of his shoulder. It’s like holding coals, but she doesn’t want to let go. She doesn’t want to stop and she tells him as much every time he asks.

Sasha’s sheets are a pale blue, soft flannel. She only notices the scorch marks after Tim has gotten dressed and left. As she prepares to bundle them up and throw them out, she notices the handprint shaped burn on the headboard and smiles privately to herself. Like she’s in on a private joke.

* * *

When she figures out the Spiral’s ritual and starts forming ideas of how to stop it, she doesn’t talk to Tim about it. When she arranges the boat trip with a Lukas and asks Jon to come with her, she doesn’t expect to come back.

She addresses a letter to Tim, though, and her Dads. She tries to explain as much as she is able, but she knows it won't be enough, that they will wonder what really happened to her for years and years. She leaves the letters on top of her desk with a post-it note asking Jon to send them when he comes back without her. She can’t bear to tell them about her plan, because then she would have to say goodbye. And she just can’t do that, it would hurt too much. 

But she goes with the knowledge that Jon will take over as Archivist.

But it doesn’t go according to plan.

A week later Tim finds her on the same bench as before, Sasha’s fingernails dig little crescents into her palm as she tries to hold back the urge to scream in frustration until her lungs ache. There are no words for this kind of thing, the rage and the guilt and the grief tearing her apart from the inside out. She hollowly wonders if Tim can feel it too if that’s why he’s come to see her.

He settles beside her as she curls in around herself, Sasha’s fingers are buried in her hair and she’s just barely suppressing shakes. 

Jon is dead and it’s her fault. 

She can still see the fear he’d tried so hard to hide as his trembling fingers clutched the map. The way he gently kissed her forehead before stepping through the door. His last words over his shoulder telling her to get out of Sannikov land before she too became unmade, to _live_.

On the boat back, Sasha sat staring quietly at a wall and Peter Lukas hadn’t attempted to comfort her or even talk to her and she’s grateful for that. 

Tim offers no sugared and artificial words about loss or about how she couldn’t have stopped Jon even if she wanted to or even that things will be okay. Save for a soft expression of his condolences, he’s silent.

He does, however, offer her his hand.

Sasha holds it tight and for who knows how long. 

* * *

Sasha tries not to get attached to her two new assistants after what had happened to Jon. It’s a futile effort; Gertrude is stubborn and efficient and Agnes has a talent for drawing people to her and getting them to spill their guts without saying much at all. Together they make quite a team and she’s endeared.

Sasha feels she should do something when she notices Agnes’ hand lingering on Gertrude’s arm, the way Gertrude watches Agnes scribble notes. Sometimes she hears their quiet laughter from within her office.

She says nothing about the two of them in the end. She’ll rely on them to be professional and silently envy the carefree way in which they can simply be.

Sasha mentions them to Tim, as he lights her cigarette with a featherlight touch of his finger. She’s learned that he doesn’t repeat the particulars of what they discuss to the cult and trusts him not to mention things said in confidence. She’s not sure what he actually tells the Lightless Flame, if he does, if they would even care.

“I wonder if we were ever that young,” Tim muses aloud. He’s adding the finishing touches to a painting of her. It’s one of several that seem to lie around his apartment.

Sasha hums softly with acknowledgment. She tends to doubt it, though.

“Do you think it’s love?” 

She shrugs, “Who knows?”

Agnes is such a quiet thing and Gertrude, she’s learned, only seems like an open book. But there’s genuine fondness there; Sasha sees it in the way Gertrude softens ever so slightly around Agnes, the way Agnes talks more around Gertrude. 

Sasha tries so hard to wish them well, she really does, but she has learned by now that maybe people like them simply do not get happy endings. Between the Watcher and everything else that hangs around them, maybe there is no room for such things.

It’s nice to pretend sometimes, though.

* * *

Tim dances with her in their dreams one night. As with most of the dreams, it feels palpable almost, the weight of her hand in his, the gentle placement of her other hand on the small of his back. He wonders if she can feel him burning even in their dreams. 

“What are we going to do?” He whispers into her hair. 

They’ve been doing this dance with each other for years and years now; a dance of not acknowledging the reality when it’s hard to parse. Pretending that Sasha isn’t getting older with each passing day, that one day, she will die and the cult will push Tim headlong into his destiny. They pretend that Sasha isn’t entrenched in the Eye, that they can stay like this for even a little longer. The solution has never been permanent and they are so acutely aware of it.

“I don’t know.” Sasha’s voice is soft, the pads of her fingers dig into his back. She doesn’t have to say the next part aloud. That this is a problem they should work out when they’re back in the waking world. Until then, it’s safe and comfortable and they can block the rest of the world out, if only for a few hours.

Sasha wakes to the sunlight pouring through the curtain and her resolve begins to waver.

* * *

Tim has known since he was born that one day he will die. It isn’t as though he could survive the scorched earth and doing the ritual isn’t a question. He will do the ritual and he will die. He loves Sasha in his own way, but he also loves his god, his family. 

What will he be if he knowingly betrays them? 

But he had never asked to be made. No one had ever thought to consider that maybe he didn’t want to raze the world, that he would have interests and passions outside of destruction. That maybe he wasn’t as devout as they thought, as he had once hoped to be. It’s a sharp kind of hurt, one he’s trying to understand.

* * *

Sasha, who has knowingly and unknowingly fought monsters as long as she’s been aware of them, stands on a precipice. Every statement about so called avatars have a common thread; they make a choice. It’s not always much of a choice, not when it’s between dying or becoming, but a choice nonetheless. 

When she talks to Martin, he tells her about how the Mother didn’t wish him to die and so he became. When Jon stands before her, fractalled and wrong, he tells her that the man who had been her assistant had known what he was about to do, gathered courage he didn’t think he had.

Sasha listens and she considers.

* * *

He holds her hand in his, runs his thumb over the ridge of her knuckles, looks over at her. Sasha is firm in her newfound resolve and stands like it; even her eyes are cold. If Tim were not a part of her, he’d be sure of her certainty. But he knows her maybe more than he knows himself, knows that underneath the calm and decisive facade, she’s afraid.

“Are you ready?” She asks him.

“No.”

But he may never be ready and she knows that, her grip tightens on his hand. They’ve spent a year if not more letting this idea blossom into an actual plan, checking and rechecking to make sure they could pull it off. Another deep breath. And the two walk forward, hand in hand.

**Author's Note:**

> i left the ending ambiguous but hopeful because i could not decide whether or not to go with a good ending or a canon-typical tragedy. 
> 
> catch me on smallandknowingdyke on tumblr ;v;


End file.
